Across and Beyond 010: Transsexuality as an Aesthetic Project
I’ve been doing a serious writing folder clean up/review. Over the last twenty years I’ve written in text files, Microsoft Word and Word Perfect. My Mac computer read the *.wpd extensions as UNIX files, which then led me to an online service that converts old file formats into newer ones.
The entire process has made me realize I need to more frequently seek out entropy in my old works. While the majority were aggressively average, and a few just plain terrible, one or two are real gems, and fiction, too. All the more exciting for me moving forward.
Noodling around the internet I came across “Disease as an Aesthetic Project” by Alina Popa. Written and released shortly before her death, Popa confronts the spectacle of her body, a body she can’t recognize, a body that fights her and a body that she uses to defy a medical system that has already dismissed her as dead.
While she wrote about the objectified, diseased body, her observations chimed with my objectified, transsexual body.
> Realization: I have never trusted my body and its responses. We are taught so by education. Fever needs to be kept at bay, symptoms have to be read by specialists, you don’t own your body, it is like a foreign coat you have to take care of and beware of it, look for signs, gather evidence. You are outside of your body, you analyze it scientifically but what does this mean. It means that you are placing it in the scripts written by strangers who are afraid of the wonder of reality and want to restrict its vastness to a few predictable scenarios.
Perhaps transsexuality could be conceived as an aesthetic project. This intellectual exercise must have been done already, yes? Let me know by who, please, if you know.
Over the last two years I’ve recorded several videos about living long-term as a transman. They now live on Youtube. I’ve separated the audio out and sent the mp3 files to their new home at anchor.fm.
If you know a young ftm or transman who may have questions about what happens after twenty years on testosterone, please send them one of these links. Trans-exclusionary radical feminists (TERFs) spew bile and medical misinformation about the long-term effects of hormones on transsexual bodies. I decided to share my experiences to assist younger trans people wondering what their future might be like. The videos and podcasts are short with no-budget, iPhone production values.
I feel compelled to also say I block all bad commenters, no questions asked.
My late summer/early fall reading: Black on Both Sides: A Racial History of Trans Identity.
Times Square, circa 1955, taken by my grandfather, W. R. Allen